Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller

1. For the remark on Exodus outselling Gone with the Wind, see Otto Preminger,
CBC radio interview, 24 February 1961, reprinted in Gerald Pratley, The Cinema of OttoPreminger (New York: Barnes, 1971), 133; the 2,500-a-day figure occurred in February 1959
(Publishers Weekly, 9 March 1959). Exodus reached the top spot on the New York Times
best-seller list on 17 May 1959, eight months after its debut.

2. Sales figures for QB VII come from the president of Doubleday, John T. Sargent,
in a letter dated 15 March 1971 to Herb Schlosberg, Uris’s business manager (copy in the
Library of Congress). In April 1974, just before QB VII was to be shown as a televised
miniseries, Bantam Books reprinted a further 300,000 paperback copies (John Bear, The#1 New York Times Best Seller [Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1992], 113, 137).

3. Quoted in Thomas A. Larkin, “A Talk with Uris,” Scáthán, July 1995. This is a Celtic
literary and news magazine.

8. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene 3, line 107. Uris opposed the view
of Abram Leon Sachar, the author of The Jew in the Contemporary World: Sufferance Isthe Badge (New York: Knopf, 1939), who wrote: “It is stupid to call upon Jews to show
their indomitable fortitude by defiance in lands where all groups have been beaten and
cowed into submission” (573). Tragically, given the events that were soon to unfold, he
added: “He [the Jew] can bear his fate … very much Better when he knows that he is an

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